Ken Hall: Fuss over school lunch should be about taste

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. The sensory explosion, the warm embrace, the experience that up to then I as a young man had been denied.

Ken Hall

I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. The sensory explosion, the warm embrace, the experience that up to then I as a young man had been denied.

What was that stuff in the bowl?

Pea soup? It couldn't be. Hadn't I been served pea soup in all the school cafeterias I had been sentenced to in my short life? Wasn't it supposed to be an unnatural shade of green with a taste and feel to match?

You probably had a similar experience, perhaps dissecting mystery meat or tracking down the rumors about who found a cigarette butt in his sloppy joe.

That's what school lunches were all about — sitting at the right table, complaining about the stuff on the tray and then scraping a good deal of it into the garbage pail.

So I have trouble relating to these new complaints, the ones that deal with calorie counts and what is being billed as an obsession with fresh fruits and vegetables.

And I have a real problem figuring out how an 850-calorie lunch is the new villain in the national effort to keep the other two-thirds of the nation's youngsters from waddling into obesity.

The complaints that seem most legitimate, and most easily met, come from athletes. Those who put on their equipment and go out to the fields instead of going home to video games and snacks have a very real need and a very good point. The calories that will keep a sixth-grader going until 2:30 or so will not be enough for someone who will spend hours after school running around and not get to eat again until early evening.

There should be a way to give those athletes a bit more. And before anybody objects that schools cannot treat athletes differently, remember that they already do. Those students are expected to give up much of their afternoons, evenings and weekends in service to the school. They get out of classes to compete and have the use of school equipment and personnel specially devoted to their activities. Some even have to pay for this privilege. Any administrator who cannot find a way to get them a few more calories is just hiding behind some convenient regulations.

And I really don't get the complaint that the feds should stay out of the lunchroom. Back when Lady Bird Johnson made highway beautification her signature cause, you didn't find the opposition going on television and denouncing this as another example of Big Brother trampling the rights of states to keep their medians scraggly.

Yet when Michelle Obama tries to set an example with her push to exercise and eat more healthy foods, it becomes a political cause.

Parents know how hard it is to instill the right eating habits in their children. You would think that they would welcome the help they now get from the cafeterias. Maybe a few need to go to lunch and see what the fuss it all about.

thrkenhall@gmail.com

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